How I Stole Your Siacoin

in bitcoin •  7 years ago 

Well, I too saw the Redditt post but did not act in time ... having just finished the word program - someone else did!

the summary is this:

  1. someone posted a 29 word seed they are having trouble with.
  2. It is off in some way. We assume he either inverted a word (this allows for 29 possibilities) or he wrote down one of the words wrong - but close to the "right" word.
    first step was to check to see that all words are in fact in the "sia seed" dictionary. 'indeed they were.
  3. I made a program to check words from the 1500 word dictionary that are "similar" not off by more than 1 character, and then 2 characters if necessary in preparation to auto-try them all.

So did the other guy!

  1. The result for 1-char off was only a few possibilities. He tried them by hand - stole the funds! All while I was still knee deep in Java code!
  2. Then he returned the funds. But this a very interesting story!

He wrote - can anybody help me recover my wallet: I wrote down the words but they dont work - here they are:
eluded logic wise ascend tagged acoustic situated stylishly younger aptitude inroads avidly hefty also godfather unrest avatar push because brunt viking gone august public tonic vulture shrugged otter adapt

Sia uses the ntropy-mnemonics Github project, which contains this dictionary of only about 1500 words.

All 29 words in the incorrect seed appeared in the entropy dictionary. Maybe he wrote a word that was similar to another word ALSO in the dictionary?

A quick program allowed me (and the guy who beat me to it) to reveal only a few possible words had similar words also in the dictionary. Few enough to try by hand. One such combination was the one! Tonic was ionic or vce versa. The point is, he was fast! Id like that guy to work for me next!

And he returned the coins ....

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Excellent write!